Miles To Go Part 6

"Okay, people, eat up. We need to hit the sack p.r.o.nto,"

Goode said.

Levin rolled his eyes. "Why does he always call us 'people'?"

"He has a Chairman Mao complex," Baldwin said.

The team chuckled, unified, thankful for a light moment and for rest.

Rennie swallowed the last of her meal and took a big drink of water. She lay on top of her sleeping bag and felt her body conform to the uneven ground. She had an hour to sleep before Levin woke her. Then she would wake Goode and sleep for three more hours. It felt too good to lie down and her breathing immediately became deep.

Rashed was tired. His legs finally ached from walking for so long, but he would never admit that to Hamid. They would push on until morning when they would have a much deserved sleep.

Then in a day and a halfor two days at the mostthey would arrive in the village and he would find a woman.

A woman who would do whatever he wanted.

Rashed had just about had his fill of the dark woodshe always grew tired of everything he claimed to love. It would be light soon. He and Hamid had spent the last five hours picking their way through the pitch-black forest. They had a flashlight but Rashed had decided that they weren't to use it. He had no fear of stumbling across anyone in these woods. Local people far and wide knew to steer clear of all routes to Armin's camp. But Rashed wanted this trip to be a kind of initiation for Hamidhe would come out of it tougher. Maybe he would even come out of it a man. He could already feel a kernel of hatred growing in the boy. Hate for Rashed, for his hardness and his cruelty. Rashed loved seeing that hate sprout. He fed off of it.

Hamid stepped on a dry branch and a loud crack sounded through the forest. Rashed was on him in a moment, his face an inch from Hamid's. He wanted to play with him, knowing the horror his angered face would present to the boy.

"Do not make a sound!" he seethed and looking around said, "Don't you know anyone might be in these woods and you and your big clumsy feet could get our heads blown off."

Rashed released him roughly and Hamid fell to the ground, his face filled with terror. Then Rashed spoke again in a barely audible voice.

"I won't die because of you. Though you might," he said, his teeth glinting in the pale moonlight, "because of me."

Rashed's face was wicked in its anger as Hamid looked up at it from the ground. A sliver of moon framed the larger man's head like a halo. The effect was disconcerting.

Rashed was enraged and Hamid couldn't puzzle out why. He seemed to have become angrier the farther they got from camp.

And then, making them walk all day and into the nightHamid felt like he might collapse. He didn't even know what he was doing. He and Rashed were to deliver a packageHamid had yet to see itthat Rashed carried in the pack on his back. He couldn't imagine what was in it. Guns, perhaps. All business in the camp seemed to have something to do with guns. Hamid was glad he hadn't been allowed to carry one on this trip. He hadn't proved very proficient with them yet. Fareed Reza had taken him aside one day during target practice when his recoiling weapon had actually flown out of his hands and nearly killed the boy shooting next to him. Fareed, at least two heads taller, had put his arm around his shoulders and told him not to worry, there were other things he would be useful for, he would find his place in the organization. That was the last time Hamid had any hope that everything would be all right. Here in the dark of the blackest night he had ever seen, with Rashed acting like a madman, life did not seem in any way all right.

Hamid heard a loud snap. Rashed was in his face again, his lips against his ear.

"I said, do-not-make-a-sound."

"It wasn't me. I swear on the Holy Koran."

Rashed became alert. He handed Hamid his pack before slipping the clip of bullets from his pocket.

Hearing a rustling, Hamid caught Rashed's eye and pointed to the left. With the clip still in his hand, Rashed edged toward the direction of the noise. The woods were dense here. Each step was carefully chosen. Hamid placed his own foot in the slight indentation in the ground left by Rashed's boot prints.

And then Rashed stopped. He was utterly still.

Suddenly, Hamid heard voices. His heart leapt into his throat and he pressed his feet into the ground so he wouldn't run away as fast as he could. Then he was able to discern the words or at least the languageEnglish.

Rashed turned to him, his eyes aflame, his lips twisted into an unholy grin. He mouthed one word Americans.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Rashed felt gleeful, joyous, rapturous. The bloodl.u.s.t that had throbbed within him, simmering just under the surface for as long as he could remember, boiled in his brain. And now he could indulge in it, luxuriate in it. And best of all, they were Americans.

He looked at Hamid, standing perfectly still with a frozen look of terror on his face. Here was his chance, the offering he had been waiting for. He wouldn't have to wait any longer for the call to arms that never seemed to come. After all the endless drills and tedious speeches that never led to anythingat least not since he had joined uphe would put Armin's supposed ideology into action. In an instant, he had thrown the magazine into place and his finger depressed the trigger.

Smythe roused slightly. Goode was waking Baldwin for the change of guard and had made some remark. Baldwin laughed quietly. Then Smythe heard the unmistakable sound of a magazine being snapped into place. Before he could even raise his weapon, the first volley of bullets had made a pattern across his chest. He could hear more bullets biting into the ground to his left and finding their home in flesh. He looked over to see Goode lying next to Baldwin. Goode was already dead. Smythe saw Baldwin unload his MP5 in the direction of the enemy fire and then his body jerked as he was. .h.i.t in the neck and chest.

Smythe could feel himself dying. Where were Levin and Vogel? His vision was beginning to blur, but he was able to make out a crumpled ma.s.s that used to be Levin. Even in the darkness, he could see red everywhere amongst the silvery greens of the forest. Then silence. Smythe lay very still. His sub-gun was lying next to him but he couldn't seem to reach for it. He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A man leaned over a young boy who was obviously dead. Baldwin must have hit him before he was shot. Is it possible there were only two of them?

The man rolled the dead boy over roughly with his boot. He was searching the boy's pack. He was looking for more ammunition.

He needed another clip. Smythe gazed longingly at his MP5, but no amount of desire could induce his useless limbs to move. It's over, he thought. Just then, from somewhere behind him, a figure flashed by.

Vogel.

He saw a look of anger and surprise in the man's eyes as she charged at him. But he was fast and swung the b.u.t.t of his weapon up quickly and smashed it against her head. Smythe wondered where the h.e.l.l her weapon was. Vogel dropped fast, holding the side of her head which was covered in blood. Then the man threw down his useless gun and was on top of her in an instant. Vogel opened her eyes and seemed to come to as soon as he was on her.

They struggled, a ma.s.s of flailing arms and legs. Smythe could hear the man repeating over and over again, his voice gravelly, in lightly accented English, "I'm going to f.u.c.k you, I'm going to f.u.c.k you."

Smythe smiled to himself. So, Vogel was going to get it in the end after all. He would have laughed if he had the strength. The man seemed to have her where he wanted hershe was neatly pinned and unable to move. She looked stoic, her eyes closed, her face set. Then she turned her head and looked at Smythe. She locked eyes with him and shook her head. Her eyes were black with rage.

This is not happening, this is not happening.

He was strong, so strong. Rennie knew his l.u.s.t made him even stronger. She could smell it on him, his breath peppered with it. How had they gotten to this point? Why hadn't she taken her weapon with her when she went behind the tree? This was her fault. But what happened to Goode? When she'd stepped away from their camp, he had been awake and alert.

Rennie lay still. She and the man had reached an impa.s.se.

They breathed heavily, almost in unison. Any moment, he would make his move. He had already wedged his body between her legs. Did she have the strength to resist him? But then, Rennie felt something hard strapped to his outer thigh against her knee.

A knife.

She turned her head and saw Smythe covered in blood laying at the base of a tree. He wasn't dead, but he was close. He was watching her. And he was smiling. The man put his mouth against her ear again and said, "I'm going to f.u.c.k you." He let go of his tight grip on her wrist to reach for the fastening of his pants. That was enough. Rennie wrenched her arm down to the knife and slammed her head into his nose. Blood gushed over her chest. She pulled the knife from its sheath and plunged it into his back. He arched upward, his face a mask of terror and astonishment. Driving the knife deeper into his back, she gritted her teeth and twisted it, feeling its resistance against his muscle and bone. He released his grip on her and she grabbed the back of his head with her other hand, forcing him to look at her before the light in his eyes faded.

"Who's f.u.c.ked now?" she said and rolled the man's body off 0.

hers with a violent shove.

She shook her head, still dazed from the blow of the gun.

Then she saw movement to her left and drew her legs up, ready to move. Smythe. His eyes were heavy-lidded but there was life in them. She scooted toward him. The ground around him was saturated with his blood. You're dead. His lips trembled. It wouldn't be long now. Then she realized he was speaking and she leaned down to him and put her ear to his mouth.

"You?" He spoke in a whisper. "You get to be the hero?

G.o.dd.a.m.n."

She felt tiny puffs of air against her cheek as he attempted to laugh. She drew back from him. His eyes were unseeing but his lips continued to move. And then they stilled.

Rennie tried to stand quickly, to right herself and regain what little control she had, but the blood pounded painfully at the wound on her head and she sat back down hard. Tremors shaking her body, she sat hugging her knees to her chest and reluctantly surveyed the scene. Five men no, sixanother lay a few feet into the woodsdead around her, some staring the unmistakable glare of death. And Brad. Rennie covered her mouth as a sob caught in her throat. She forced herself onto her knees and crawled slowly toward him. Tears now blurred her vision as he wavered and danced through the distortion. She stopped short of where he lay slumped against a tree. She rested her hand on his leg and cried quietly, mouth wide as if a scream might emerge, but only a few choked noises slipped from her throat.

Get it together, Rennie. Get it f.u.c.king together.

She pa.s.sed her hand over her face as if to clear away all the pain and confusion that had burrowed into her mind. She had to think.

The satellite phone.

She needed to try to make contact. She stood slowly and made her way to Smythe's pack. She glanced at him, his eyes still gaping, and thought of the moment that had pa.s.sed between them as the man was on top of her. He had seemed so satisfied.

b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Hero. Could he possibly see the world that way? Heroes and villains. She reached into his pack and found the phone.

The number she needed to call was committed to memory. She powered on the phone and raised the antenna. The signal was weak but it might be possible to make a successful call. She stared at the signal indicator. She could imagine Brian Ryder's voice at the end of the line. He manned communications at CT3's Central Command at Quantico. And then what? What would she say? That the team had been ambushed and she was the only one alive? It would only confirm to every naysayer who had been against a woman's inclusion on the team that it was a disastrous experiment. And she would be the scapegoat.

Was she responsible? How could she be? The only reason she wasn't dead, too, was that she had stepped away from camp to relieve herself and was returning when she had heard the first burst of gunfire. But she hadn't taken her weapon with her. A fatal error. One that shouldn't have happened. It was against every protocol that she would have left her weapon. And now everyone was dead. She looked again at the signal indicator. This could be the FBI's only chance to take Armin out without the a.s.sa.s.sination being tied to the United States. She stepped away from the camp and the signal grew stronger. She stared at the satellite phone, considering her options. Then she glanced over her shoulder at the brutal scene behind her and powered down the phone.

Rennie went back to Brad, remnants of sobs still catching her breath, and arranged his body so that he lay flat, his arms crossed over his chest. Then she turned to Goode and did the same. The condition of his head showed that his death had been mercifully brief. Levin was a mess, riddled with bullets. She hooked her arms under his shoulders and dragged him so that he lay next to Baldwin and Goode, leaving a trail of blood. Then Smythe. She hated to touch him, but arranged his body next to the others. She laid their weapons and their packs alongside of them and then took their sleeping bags and covered them.

Her strength had returned now that she knew what she had to do. First she went for Baldwin's sniper rifle. It almost seemed like a sacred thing to her, because Brad had treated it that way.

A deadly thing of power that could snuff out a life in a second.

Rennie had some training on the weapon, maybe even more than most. After the initial team training she had gone out with Brad a few times to shoot, with this very rifle. So it was familiar, but she knew she wasn't an expert. She lashed the gun under her own pack and stowed the ammunition in a pocket. Then she went back to Goode to get the maps and the medical kit. Leaving her bedroll where it lay, she dumped most of her extra clothing and began filling the s.p.a.ce it left with as many MREs as could fit.

Finally, she bent to Goode's pack, pulling from it the M2 mini-bomb and storing it in the cargo pocket of her pants.

Water. Her weakness. Rennie collected three extra bladders, mostly empty. Once she got to the river, she could fill them. Now she turned her attention to the man she had killed. She didn't want to get near him after all that had pa.s.sed between them, but she had to investigate his body. Even if she couldn't use anything she found, she would need it for her report. Stilted sentences began to compose themselves in her mind, but she put a stop to it. There would be time to worry about salvaging her career later. She hoped.

Rennie stood above the dead man. He had to be from Armin's camp. There were no other outposts in this remote part of the country. She put her boot on his hip and shoved, but he was too heavy. Steeling herself, she sank down on her knees, grabbed his trousers and s.h.i.+rt and rolled him over. She looked at him coldly.

His eyes were wide and he still had a look of surprise on his features, mouth agape.

Rennie had never encountered death in this form, in the field, from combat. And by her own hand. She couldn't a.n.a.lyze what she was feeling. It was a kind of pure rage, one that had pa.s.sed from the sort of madness that confounds the mind to one that offers a cold, raw clarity she didn't know was in her. Her tremors had long ceased and she was, for the moment, as calm as if she had just woken from a long and deeply restful sleep.

She suddenly grasped his s.h.i.+rt again, with both hands, and heaved him up to her, her strength returned, and stared intently at his features.

This is the man I killed.

Just as suddenly, she dropped him back to the ground, his head lolling, and began rifling through his pockets. She found a small penknife, a handkerchief and a pouch with a few Iranian coins, confirming he was likely one of Armin's men.

Rennie moved to the boy next. He seemed impossibly young for a soldier, almost a child. She felt a rush of reverence for her country well up inside herthey didn't employ boys to fight their wars. Young men, yes. But not boys. She hesitated before touching him. His neck and torso had been destroyed by gunfire and were nothing but a pulpy ma.s.s. One leg was twisted at an odd angle. He was already down before she had darted from behind the tree and run at the man. Rennie wondered who shot him.

She could see a rectangular outline in one of the pockets of his pants. She knelt and discovered a little book of Koranic sayings.

She shook her head and laid the book on his chest, covering it with his hand. The rest of his pockets yielded nothing, but his pack was another matter. In it were the usual items needed for a long hike and, at the bottom, a thick envelope. It wasn't very heavy and certainly wasn't a bomb. Rennie pried it open and slipped out the cache of papers. It was a short doc.u.ment, maybe ten pages, handwritten in Farsi. Rennie could recognize a few words but not enough to interpret it. The final page was a hand-drawn map, showing a network of buildings in a few blocks radiusRennie recognized it as the nearby village.

Again she thought of calling in, felt the weight of the satellite phone in her pocket. But what good would it do? She had no way of interpreting the doc.u.ment. She returned it to the envelope and slipped it into her pack. Safe and sound.

Rennie stood and took a deep breath. It was only seven in the morning and she was already sweating heavily. She stripped off the long-sleeved blood-soaked s.h.i.+rt, rolled it and tied it around her hips. Her tank top wasn't nearly as bloodied and the air felt good on her shoulders. She surveyed the scene again through the thin morning light. There was nothing else she could do. She slipped on her pack, heavier now from the added equipment, and set out in the direction of the river.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Armin Training Camp Fareed Reza was growing tired of his life.

"You make an unlikely terrorist," he spoke to his reflection, the razor pausing on his chin. He shook his head and laughed derisively under his breath. It was perhaps the first time he had ever used the word in relation to himself and the work he did for Ahmad Armin. Terrorist. He laid the razor on the table next to the basin of water and stared into his dark eyes, his expression one of blank horror.

What have I done?

He'd come down a long strange path after he left London.

He loved London, its intensity, its diversity, as one good neighborhood yielded to another not quite as good and then that yielded to something raw and buzzing with every sordid permutation of life one could imagine. It always suited him more than the city of his birth, New Delhi, with its stifling heat and open sewers and where his family endured in the small Muslim minority. And it certainly suited him more than Ahmad Armin's camp clinging to its little mountain ridge.

Fareed had been a good student and had gone up to Oxford to read history, a discipline he had little pa.s.sion for, but he was a good son and it was what his father wanted. Finis.h.i.+ng his degree, he entered a graduate studies program in London. It was a time of intense political activism in the city's Muslim community and Fareed had begun to become interested in politics. He even imagined he might run for office one day, but his father had quashed the idea with a dismissive wave of the hand. "Politics is a dirty business, my son will not soil the name of his family."

It was finally the complicated stew of East and West that had brought him to where he stood, shaving his face in a makes.h.i.+ft house on a dusty cliff. In a replaying of one of the oldest conflicts known to manthe old country against the new, tradition against progress, father against sonhis father's dismissive gesture had roused a rebellious instinct, one that in a moment of uncharacteristic anger sent him walking London's poorer neighborhoods in search of something, anything, his father would revile. He'd found it on the doorstep of the city's most controversial mosque where he met a man who would introduce him to Ahmad Armin. He had enough of the West in him that he was unable to swallow his father's wave of the hand like a good Indian boy would and, in truth, he was instantly fascinated by the politics of the mosque. But he was soon to learn that activism tainted with violence went far beyond the inevitable corruption in politics. And though his mind was nimble enough that he was able to construct elaborate justifications for what he considered to be a purely intellectual antagonism toward the West, he knew that there was only rot at the core of it. Now, that hard vein of defiance, born out of his father's fateful gesture, had finally begun to crack with age.

Fareed picked up the razor again, recalling the summer after his first year at Oxford. He had taken a month in the States with his father's moneythey were still on good terms then. He'd stood in the West Wing of the National Gallery transfixed by a portrait of a woman. Da Vinci's Ginevra D'Benci. Feeling a presence behind him, he turned, taking in a woman who had such a striking resemblance to the portrait that it took his breath away. She, too, was consumed by the painting and turned her wide dark eyes upon him when she heard him gasp.

"Someone said I look like her."

She was simple and direct and an AmericanAmerican to the core, unthinking in the way that most cannot affordand he fell in love with her in an instant. They spent three weeks together.

Fareed had not yet developed any firm ideology, but he had been long certain that American influence around the globe was a dangerous ent.i.ty. To love this woman seemed like the ultimate betrayal of his principles, something he couldn't stomach. So, one morning, like a coward, he left her before dawn, without a word, hiding himself away from her until his return to England.

Her image had come to him at unexpected moments in the last weeks, sometimes superimposed with the image of Da Vinci's great portrait. Lately he had begun to believe that this cowardly act defined him. He had never confronted anything directlyhis father, the woman and, perhaps that of most consequence, his ideology. He had always taken the route of the snake.

Fareed wiped his face with a towel. He had aged, these past few years. At forty, he was no longer boyish. He folded the towel and hung it neatly on the rack. He moved to the roughly cut window of his hastily constructed house and pulled the curtain aside. Looking onto the maneuvers field, he watched the young men going through their drill. He thought of Hamid. Nice boy.

He had tried to prevent Armin from sending him with Rashed to the village. But perhaps it would make him feel useful and ease some of his homesickness. Fareed regretted recruiting him.

A nasty businessrecruiting young boys.

He sometimes felt that he and Armin were playing a child's game of war and he suspected the game was about to become more serious. Armin had begun to talk more frequently about doing something on a larger scale, an event creating an impact that would put them on the run for the rest of their lives.